A Glove Shop in Vienna and Other Stories, Page 2

  And then at last it was over, the agonising waiting, and the moment had come. The moment when they all assembled in the dining room and listened to the sweet soft tones of the old cow-bell with which their mother summoned them. The moment when the door was thrown open and, the children first, the adults afterwards walked in, dazzled, towards the presents and the tree.

  With a last despairing glance at Vicky’s face, Frau Fischer reached for her bell. And then: ‘ Stop!’ said Vicky. ‘We’re not all here.’

  Everyone looked at everyone else. ‘I’m here,’ said Rudi, reasonably, sticking to essentials. So were Tilda and Fritzl; so was Fritzl’s mother. Herr Doktor Fischer with his home-made fire extinguisher was there; so was the cook, so were the maids.

  ‘Cousin Poldi isn’t here,’ said Vicky.

  Herr Doktor Fischer and his wife exchanged glances.

  ‘She’s gone, Vicky; she’s going back to Linz. She thought it would be better.’

  ‘Then she must be fetched,’ said Vicky.

  ‘But, Vicky…’

  ‘We can’t go in till we are all together,’ said Vicky, still in that same inflexible, unchildlike voice. ‘She’ll have to be fetched.’

  Herr Doktor Fischer took out his watch. ‘ The train doesn’t go until four‚’ he said to his wife. ‘ I could probably get her still. But it would take some time.’

  Vicky said nothing. She just stood and waited and for the first time since Fritzl had stolen to her in the night, there was a glimmer of tears in her eyes.

  ‘You had better go,’ said Vicky’s mother quickly. ‘We can wait.’

  The word wait fell on the twins’ heads like a cartload of boulders.

  ‘No,’ wailed Rudi, ‘Rudi can’t wait!’

  ‘Nor can’t Tilda wait neither. Tilda wants her presents now!’

  ‘Hush,’ said Vicky sternly. ‘How dare you act like that on Christmas Eve? And anyway, I’m going to tell you a story.’

  Still sniffing, doubtful, they came closer. ‘In the bathroom?’

  ‘No. Here.’

  Vicky looked over at Fritzl, ready to measure herself against him, and then looked away again because somehow there was no longer any threat.

  ‘What story do you think?’ she said to the twins. ‘On a day like this? The story of the Christmas Angel, of course. The one who came last night, to bring the presents and decorate the tree.’

  And she told the story. Told it so that Frau Fischer had to move over to the velvet window curtain and hide her face. Told it so that the sound of Herr Doktor Fischer’s footsteps, the squeak of Cousin Poldi’s returning button boots, were almost an intrusion.

  No one said anything. Only when at last the great doors did open and Vicky moved forward to follow Fritzl and the ecstatically tottering twins into the room, her mother held her back.

  ‘No, Vicky,’ she said softly, ‘let the children go in first. We adults … we adults will come on afterwards.’

  And then very slowly, she led her daughter forward towards the shining glory of the tree.

  DOUSHENKA

  THERE WAS nothing odd about finding a photograph of Greatuncle Edwin wedged at the back of a bureau drawer. It was a day for finding wedged great-uncles, crumpled brides cut from local newspapers, albums of yellowing babies … I was in my last year at Oxford and had come up to London to help my parents move house.

  But Great-uncle Edwin … ? He had been a grocer, I thought, in a South London suburb. Wimbledon? Teddington? So why this photograph in which he wore a high-necked boyar blouse, felt boots and a round fur hat? Beside the mild, slightly surprised figure in its Russian clothes was the usual draped table on which he rested a light hand. But where was the aspidistra? Where the picture of the Queen? That wasn’t … but of course it was. A samovar!

  I put the picture in my pocket, but I had to wait until the following Christmas for the visit of my mother’s eccentric older sister, my Aunt Geraldine, to get the story.

  ‘Edwin?’ she said. ‘Ah, yes, poor Edwin! Dear God, what a romantic that man was! And then to marry Edith … And yet…’

  ‘Would you tell me?’ I said. We were walking along the Embankment towards Chelsea Bridge. Beside us, the Thames snuffled gently against its walls, a slow barge went down towards Greenwich. It was all very English, very peaceful, very grey.

  She looked at me, surprised, pleased perhaps that I – uncouth and masculine and young – should seem to care about the past.

  ‘He was obsessed ‚’ she said. ‘ I don’t know how it happened. Perhaps a label on a crate of smoked sturgeon from the Volga, a delivery note for Ternov ham … He kept a grocer’s shop in Putney.’

  ‘Russia?’ I said and shivered as she nodded, because it is a devastating experience, finding a fellow-sufferer from the same disease.

  ‘If he was walking along here with you ‚ ’ said my Aunt Geraldine, ‘he wouldn’t see this river.’

  ‘I know‚ ’ I said. ‘He’d see the blue ice beginning to break on the Neva, the pale façade of the Winter Palace, Rasputin’s unspeakable head bobbing on the water…’

  My aunt looked at me. A long look. ‘I see ‚’ she said. ‘Though of course in those days Rasputin was still alive.’

  ‘One can’t choose one’s obsessions‚’ she went on, and I think she meant to comfort me. ‘I myself spent the first three years of my adolescence as Third Daughter in the House of the Four Winds in the province of Soo Chow. Outwardly, of course, I was Geraldine Ferguson, the only girl in the Upper Fourth with acne and bunions. But inwardly I was Golden Bells whose verses did not displease the Emperor.’ She stopped for a moment and we leant over the Embankment Wall. ‘Something to do with reincarnation, perhaps,’ she said.

  ‘And Uncle Edwin?’ I prompted.

  ‘Ah yes. Well, he had it very badly. Words like “droshki” or “troika” would send him into a sort of trance. I imagine he must have been the only grocer in London who climbed to his haricot bean jar on three volumes of Lermontov. But of course he never had a hope of going and he found the language almost impossible to learn.’

  ‘And then he married Edith?’

  My aunt nodded, staring at the gentle, unfrozen, incurably un-Russian Thames.

  ‘I shall never know what made him do it,’ she said.

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘If I know what she was like, it is because I was with Edwin when he died. It was only in the last days of his life that he spoke freely. Before that he never complained.’

  I waited.

  ‘She was a “not tonight, dear” woman,’ said my aunt. ‘They’re extinct now, I gather, and thank God for it because they’re killers. Slow killers. Poisoners. Edith didn’t just have nights when it was too hot and nights when it was too cold and nights when she had cream on her face. She had nights when her stays had left her tender and nights when the neighbour’s mother-in-law was asleep the other side of the wall…’

  ‘Poor Edwin.’

  ‘Poor Edwin indeed. Of course it just made him worse. He’d read Pushkin: “ soul of my soul, light of my heart”, sitting there on a barrel of pickled cucumbers, and then go upstairs and find Edith with her mouth shut like a trap because it was the anniversary of the Prince Consort’s funeral.’

  ‘So what happened then?’

  ‘What happened then,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, ‘was that a man called Mr Frobisher shot himself.’

  ‘He hadn’t,’ she went on, ‘ meant to shoot himself. He’d been after pheasants on his home moor when he tripped and fell and the gun went off. Mr Frobisher was a retired haberdasher who’d done extremely well out of a patent spring-clip for bow ties. He was also Edwin’s godfather and when the will was read, it turned out that he’d left Edwin a thousand pounds.’

  I stopped dead, a few yards from the Albert Bridge.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t?’

  My aunt nodded. ‘ Yes,’ she said. ‘He was a brave man. He went to Russia.’

  ‘Brave?’ I said. ‘Idiotic! Insan
e!’ To put all those dreams to the test… to travel on trains to whose wheels still clung ghost shreds of Anna Karenina’s muff… to let the sapphire curtains of the Maryinsky part on the fabulous Kschessinskaya, mistress of the Czar …

  ‘He left his assistant to look after the shop,’ said my aunt, ‘ sent Edith back to Mummy in Clapham (and weren’t they both pleased!) and arrived, at the end of April, at the Finland Station in St Petersburg.’

  Like everyone who dreams of Russia, he had seen it always under snow. But now it was spring. In the Alexander Gardens, where the English governesses sat watching diminutive princesses roll their hoops, the lime trees were green and gold. The Neva sparkled and danced between its granite banks, the air blew softly from the Gulf of Finland. From his hotel he could see Peter the Great, bronze and invincible, astride his rearing horse; in the drawer of his writing desk, impressing him vastly, he found the visiting card of the room’s former occupant: Lord Broomhaven of Craghill Castle, Yorks.

  Edwin had no plan for his days. He just walked and walked, as pleased with the marble and jasper sarcophagi of the dead Romanovs as with a stall selling gingerbread from Tver.

  And then one evening he was walking down Theatre Street…

  My aunt paused. ‘You’ve heard of it?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I’d heard of it all right. A wide and elegant street running between the Alexandrinsky Theatre and the Fontanka river. A street peopled with limbo’s most graceful ghosts: the young Pavlova running to the Summer Gardens to feed her swans; Karsavina, after her début, ecstatic at Petipa’s praise; sledgeloads of nascent cygnets or Sugar-plum fairies driving to rehearsal at the Maryinsky … For on one side of Theatre Street, half huge and splendid palace, half nunnery, is the place where it all began: the Imperial Ballet School.

  Edwin was no balletomane. It was the hour of the evening meal, the street was empty and he was on the way back to his hotel. What stopped him was a sound: perhaps the most forlorn sound in the whole world. The sound of someone not crying.

  He turned. Leaning against a closed doorway in the side of the huge building was a young girl. She wore an old-fashioned brown cloak a little small for her; an ancient carpet-bag lay like an unwanted animal across her feet, and on her long, dark lashes he could see the tears held steady by her bursting will.

  ‘Are you locked out?’ Edwin managed in his clumsy Russian.

  She lifted her face to his. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘ But for ever. I have been expelled for ever from the Imperial Ballet school.’

  Her name was Kira. Edwin took her back to the hotel. And began, he said, his life.

  ‘If you consider,’ said my aunt, ‘ you’ll realise that always, in every age, there’s been a romantic ideal: a kind of girl whose looks, whose whole way of life, appeases that yearning for chivalry and tenderness that even the most sophisticated men don’t seem able to stamp out of themselves. All those Paris midinettes with their poverty and hearts of gold; those demure oppressed Victorian governesses … And of course, then as now, the girls of the ballet.’

  Kira was barely seventeen, small-boned and supple as a willow. Not at all beautiful, Edwin told my aunt, desperately proud of this piece of detachment. Not beautiful, then: a narrow face with immense Byzantine eyes, smooth hair pulled up behind faun’s ears. ‘And when she sat down to listen to you,’ Edwin said, ‘it was her feet she folded.’

  As soon as he took charge of Kira, Edwin changed. He might really have been the Lord Broomhaven of Craghill whose visiting card he had taken to carrying in his pocket. He ordered a room for her in the hotel, was told there was no room, insisted – and got one. He asked for a meal to be served to them upstairs, was told it was too late, and presently sat with her by his window over grilled sturgeon and sparkling Crimean wine.

  And afterwards, lying on his bearskin rug, shredding its loose fur into petals with her narrow, nervous hands, Kira told him her story.

  ‘How did he understand her?’ I asked, ‘ if his Russian was so bad?’

  My aunt shrugged. ‘He understood her because he had to understand her,’ she said.

  Kira was in her last year at the Ballet School, due to leave soon and join the corps de ballet at the Maryinsky. She made him see her life there very clearly: the huge, empty rooms where they practised, the vast dormitories each with its own governess in her curtained bed; the windows to the street made of frosted glass because once a pupil had eloped with a young hussar. The discipline, the austerity was what came over most. But she was happy.

  And then her father, an idealistic country schoolmaster, wrote a book which was regarded as seditious and was sent to Siberia. A few months later her brother, a student at the Conservatoire, got himself mixed up with a group of revolutionaries and was imprisoned in the dreaded fortress of St Peter and St Paul.

  Even then, she said, they wouldn’t have done anything to her. The ballet was outside politics in Russia, it was their pride to have it so. But she had lost her head.

  ‘It was knowing he was so near,’ she said, lifting her head to the window where the thin gold spire of the fortress cathedral still pierced the pale light of a northern evening. ‘Just across the river.’

  She started creeping out at night to meet his friends, a group of hot-heads who were making plans to free him. Inevitably she was discovered. And dismissed …

  ‘But where will you go?’ asked Edwin. ‘Is your mother still alive?’

  Kira shook her head. There was only her Aunt Lydia, who lived in a small town near Kazan. A dreadful town, Kira said: two dusty streets, endless fields of sugar-beet. ‘And chickens. You’ve never seen so many chickens.’

  It was this aunt she had been vainly awaiting when Edwin came.

  ‘I need hardly tell you,’ said my Aunt Geraldine, as we made our way back along the river, ‘ that Edwin behaved with perfect propriety…’

  He sent another telegram to Kira’s Aunt Lydia, installed Kira in his own room while he moved to a smaller one overlooking a courtyard, and prepared to make tolerable for the shocked and lonely girl the time of waiting.

  He began formally enough with drives to the Islands‚ visits to museums. But soon he found that she liked, as he did, just to walk the streets, just to look and listen, and explore …

  So they fed the pigeons in the Summer Gardens, bought hot piroshki and ate them leaning against the bronze horses of the Anichkov Bridge … In the evenings they strolled along the embankment and listened to the students playing their mandolins, or drank lemonade on one of the barge cafes moored along the Quays. And always, without seeming to do so Edwin managed, in this city which was wholly strange to him, to avoid any place which might give her pain. Not just the Maryinsky Theatre, but all the theatres in this pleasure-loving town. Not just a poster announcing a ballet programme – even the portrait of a dancer in an art shop he could somehow smell out and keep from her.

  Gradually her natural gaiety came to the surface, her eyes lost their shipwrecked look. On the day she laughed out loud at a tiny Maltese terrier, like a white wig on casters, which was chasing a huge Borzoi across Mars Meadow, he felt as though he had been given a million pounds. And already, knowing what the future would bring, he began to hoard those small, unimportant details which memory uses to unlock the doors of love. The way she cupped her bowl of coffee, holding its warmth against her chest; the despairing shake of her head when he mispronounced, yet again, a poem she was teaching him about a crocodile walking down the Nevsky Prospect… She was a thief, too, unashamedly stealing sugar from the cafe tables to feed to the tired old droshky nags.

  And every day as they returned to the hotel Edwin would hold his breath, expecting to see the waiting figure of Aunt Lydia, whom he imagined always as a vast peasant woman in felt boots and sacking, with a basket of chickens in her lap. And when she wasn’t sitting there, he felt weak with relief. Another day’s reprieve. Another day of idyll.

  For what happened next, Edwin always blamed himself. He should have taken more care, supervised what sh
e drank …

  ‘One morning,’ said my aunt, ‘ Kira woke flushed and feverish. She couldn’t eat. By the evening she was very ill.’

  It was typhoid fever. The hotel insisted she be moved to hospital. Edwin bribed and cajoled and blustered and they put up blankets dipped in disinfectant and let her stay. Edwin nursed her and let no one near. Two days earlier he had been shy of touching her elbow to guide her across the road. Now he washed her, changed her nightclothes, held her head when she vomited. When the old-fashioned English doctor wanted her hair cut, Edwin himself cut the long black tresses, strand by strand, while she slept.

  In her delirium, Kira went back into early childhood. She wept as the chickens of Kazan pecked her small fingers, ran after her brother begging him to wait, oh, please to wait for her, screamed as her mother’s grave was filled again with earth. And always, like a brook running through the centre of her experience, was this leit-motif, the work of the ballet, as she murmured: ‘Pilé . . . battement tendu … soutenu. . .’‚ counted her beat and in her cracked and fever-ridden voice hummed snatches of music.

  Edwin never left her, day or night. Before, he had had the luxury of a romantic and tender emotion; he had been ‘in love’. Now he cut right through that. Kira became his unborn child, the wife he had never had, the woman she would be when she was old. When it was over, he said, he knew her.

  At the peak of Kira’s illness, Aunt Lydia arrived at the hotel. He had imagined her quite wrongly. She was a thin, anxious woman in an exhumed-looking black coat – the village schoolmistress. All the time he spoke to her she kept a handkerchief soaked in carbolic across her mouth. Illness terrified her; she dreaded being asked to stay and nurse her niece.

  Edwin reassured her, gave her money for the journey back, told her he would bring Kira himself when she was well. And forgot her.

  It is a slow illness, typhoid fever, and nearly a month passed before Kira was out of danger. Then suddenly she was sitting up in bed, convalescent. She had a passion for jigsaw puzzles. There was one in particular, of the Czarina and the four little Grand Duchesses … ‘A real stinger, that was,’ Edwin told my aunt. ‘We must have spent hours looking for Anastasia’s hair-ribbon.’